In Search of Happiness

Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent and an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s Jazz District, and up to Alaska, along the fabled Telegraph Trail toward Siberia.

All of the qualities readers love in Amy Bloom’s work–her humor and wit, her elegant and irreverent language, her unflinching understanding of passion and the human heart–come together in the embrace of this brilliant novel, which is at once heartbreaking, romantic, and completely unforgettable.

Amy Bloom is the author of two novels, two collections of short stories, and a nominee for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and numerous anthologies here and abroad. She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Vogue, Slate, and Salon, among many other publications, and has won a National Magazine Award. Her first book of nonfiction, Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, is an exploration of the varieties of gender. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.

Novelist, broadcaster and critic Sarah Dunant is a former presenter of both Radio 4's 'Woman's Hour' and BBC Television's 'The Late Show' which included, until 1997, the annual broadcast of the Booker Prize for Fiction ceremony, she is the author of several novels. She is the creator of private investigator Hannah Wolfe, featured in Birth Marks (1991), Fatlands (1993), winner of a Crime Writers' Association Macallan Silver Dagger for Fiction, and Under My Skin (1995). She is a patron of the Orange Prize for Fiction and reviews for various newspapers and magazines including The Times and The Observer, and is a regular presenter of BBC Radio 3's 'Night Waves'. Her novels include Transgressions (1997) and Mapping the Edge (1999), both of which are being adapted as films. Her latest novels, The Birth of Venus (2003), a tale of art, passion, politics and danger, and her most recent book, In the Company of the Courtesan (2006), are set in Renaissance Italy.